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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a

meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life.

And on Wednesdays we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful.

With them we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives.

But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

This cannot be allowed to happen. The true end of the Republic did not come with the arrival of Julius Caesar.

The sign that things had collapsed came years before, not once, but many times.

The political process in Rome which had never been perfect broke down into throngs of violent street mobs.

As Mike Duncan recently said on the Daily Stoic Podcast and in his amazing book The Storm Before The Storm, it started with the crisis of the year 133, the first time that political differences escalated to violence.

Over what? A land redistribution bill. The nobles and the aristocrats assembled behind a senator and launched an armed attack killing some 300 people.

Rome had never seen such a massacre as Duncan writes and it was one of the bloodiest days in Roman political history.

This is why the Stoics were so routinely aghast at mobs. Why they warned against anger and chaos and hatred. They had witnessed it firsthand.

Not just the escalating violence that led to the collapse of the Republic either. They were themselves the victims of persecutions, of philosophers.

They saw how Nero all too easily was able to scapegoat the Christians as employed to distract the Romans from his incompetence and evil.

And so it goes in America and many other nations. It's why the horrifying murder of Armad Arbery can't be dismissed as just some crime that happened in Georgia.

It's why violence against Asians and Jews cannot be tolerated, cannot be ignored.

David French, another guest on the podcast recently wrote a movie, a movie titled Can America Be America When Jews Are Beating In The Streets?

No country can allow anyone to be beaten in the streets. Let alone a vulnerable minority with a 2000 year history of persecution.

Because when the wolves of hate are loose, no one is safe. We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot allow our political process to devolve any further, to descend into open violence in the streets.

We cannot dismiss these events as isolated instances. We cannot engage in what aboutism. Because if we do, if we do nothing, as Marcus really said, we are not only committing an injustice by allowing injustice to happen.

But we are ultimately imperilating ourselves. Just as we saw in Rome, as we saw in Germany, as we have seen anywhere that mob violence is encouraged or allowed.

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